No security problems, few protesters at Ayers speech

April 28, 2010

LARAMIE, Wyo. -- Security was heightened as William Ayers delivered a speech at the University of Wyoming today, but only a handful of demonstrators showed up to protest the Vietnam-era radical after a federal judge forced the university to host him.

Roughly 1,100 people went through bag and coat searches to enter the event at a campus gym. About 10 protesters gathered outside the gym's entrance, carrying American flags and denouncing Ayers for his activities in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Now a University of Illinois-Chicago professor, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, an anti-war group that claimed to be responsible for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, and was suspected in others.

Chesney Rathbun, a UW senior from Hulet, Wyo., held a sign reading "Millions of veterans died for this?!?" The sign had pictures of the Pentagon and a mug shot of Ayers. Rathbun said he agreed with Ayers' right to speak, but opposed Ayers' viewpoints.

"Terrorism is not welcome here," Rathbun said. "Millions of veterans died for the freedoms that our beautiful country affords them, and he's taking advantage of (those freedoms)."

There were no reports of security problems as Ayers' speech began Wednesday night with demonstrators outside the gym enduring a light snowstorm.

Ayers' arrival in Wyoming brought to a close a monthlong fight over whether he should be allowed to speak at the state's only four-year public university.

The prospect of Ayers' visit provoked a tide of angry reaction from some critics in Wyoming, a conservative-leaning state that has voted for every Republican presidential candidate since 1968. The university cited safety concerns in refusing to rent out space for the event.

Ayers' and the student who invited him sued UW, arguing the university had violated the constitutional guarantee of free speech. They suggested the university was more concerned about losing donors than safety.

"A donor who gives to the University of Wyoming -- just as a donor who gives to the University of Illinois or the University of Chicago or Harvard or Yale or the University of California -- gives to the idea of the university," Ayers said Wednesday. "That donor doesn't get to say 'By the way, you have to hire this professor and this is the book the professor has to teach out of.' What kind of university would that be?"